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Stitch now supports Google BigQuery as a data warehouse endpoint

Up until now, Stitch has been focused on the Amazon ecosystem. Our infrastructure runs on a mix of EC2, S3, SQS, and other AWS products, and the only destination we supported was Amazon Redshift.

That changes today. I’m excited to announce our partnership with Google Cloud Platform and the beta of BigQuery as a Stitch destination.

BigQuery features

BigQuery is a revolutionary cloud data warehouse. It’s incredibly powerful, and abstracts away many of the considerations that have traditionally been part of the job of managing a data warehouse. For example:

There’s no notion of spinning up and down a BigQuery instance — it’s always available.

There’s also no decision to make about how much computational power or storage space to allocate. You’re charged only for the resources you use.

BigQuery is a distributed platform where storage and compute can scale independently. Each query is automatically distributed among tens of thousands of machines in Google’s infrastructure, which results in impressive performance on very large data sets.

BigQuery pricing and performance

Users who have worked with other data warehouses will notice a difference in three key areas:

Pricing: BigQuery can be cheaper when you’re not actively using it, but it can be tricky to forecast what your bill will be at the end of the month if you’re used to a fixed monthly or hourly rate for compute resources. However, you can set custom billing alerts and quotas to ensure that this stays within reasonable bounds.

Dialect: BigQuery’s SQL dialect is a little different from the ones used in other tools, so you’ll want to factor that into the ramp time on your projects. BigQuery’s beta support for standard SQL will make this less relevant in the future.

Query performance: Since queries are automatically distributed over many machines, extremely intensive queries can happen in less than a minute, but you’ll never get sub-second response times, even for very simple queries.

Stitch and BigQuery

BigQuery is on the cutting edge of modern data warehousing, and we’re incredibly excited to be adding it to the growing universe of Stitch integrations. If you’re interested in learning more, read our documentation.